Toffee and Treachery

For one terrible minute, the whole of Blackberry Bay was laughing. And then they weren't.

The eighth body Beatrice Honeywell found in Blackberry Bay was dressed as a guy and burning on top of the bonfire on the fifth of November, in front of the entire village, before anyone realised he was real. And of all the things she has seen in this crooked seaside village, that one — the great cheer turning slowly into a scream — is the one she will carry longest.

The dead man is Raymond Blight: councillor, bully, spider at the centre of a dozen committees, a man of much public standing and much private ruthlessness. He was also, twenty years ago, the man responsible for the bonfire that killed sixteen-year-old Danny Trevose — responsible, and never held accountable, having blamed the weather and the boy and walked away clean while Danny's family and friends carried the grief alone into two decades of quiet ruin.

The village has a great many suspects. Everyone hated Blight. But underneath the ordinary dislike there is something older and more specific: the buried grief of a village that watched a boy burn and never got its justice. And the question is not only who killed Raymond Blight, but who in Blackberry Bay loved Danny Trevose enough to do, after twenty years, the terrible thing the law never did.

Toffee and Treachery is the eighth book in The Cinnamon Cottage Mysteries — the most emotionally powerful book in the series. A warm, deeply felt British cozy mystery about grief, justice, the faithful love that outlasts twenty years of quiet ruin, and the extraordinary moral courage it takes to decide, in the end, that a fire of grief has taken enough — and to choose to put it out.

Includes two recipes: Aunt Maud's Bonfire Toffee and Blackberry Bay Parkin. Bake the parkin a week early and let it grow gloriously sticky. Some things are worth waiting for.

The fire took enough. It is long past time for the warm kind — the hearth, the gathering, the one that brings everyone in out of the dark.